Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Mar 8, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 12, 2019 - May 6, 2019
Date Accepted: May 23, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Utilization of Hospital Room Hospitality Features on Patient-Controlled Tablet Computers: Cohort Study
Background:
Patient portals tethered to electronic health records can improve patient experience, activation, and outcomes. However, adoption of inpatient portals has been challenging. One way to potentially increase inpatient portal usage is to integrate it with a room control (RC) app on a common tablet computer.
Objective:
The aim of this study was to perform a retrospective analysis of patient usage of an RC app provided on tablet computers in patient rooms of our new inpatient tower.
Methods:
We identified all patients who were admitted for >24 hours to our new inpatient tower over a 90-day period from September 1 to November 30, 2017. After excluding newborn patients from our analysis, we then identified patients who used the RC app at least one time during their admission. We linked these data to patient demographics (including age, sex, and race) and admitting service. We then performed univariable and multivariable logistic regression to assess patterns of RC app usage.
Results:
A total of 3411 patients were admitted over the course of the study period; 2242/3411 (65.73%) used the RC app during their hospitalization. Compared with white patients, other/mixed/unknown race and Asian, Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, American Indian race were significantly associated with increased use of the RC app in a multivariable analysis. Increasing age was significantly associated with increased usage of the RC app. Usage of the RC app also varied by admitting services. Compared with general medicine, bone marrow transplant and general surgery patients had increased usage of the RC app. Conversely, critical care, medical specialties, neurology, surgical subspecialties, and obstetrics/gynecology were all associated with decreased usage of the RC app.
Conclusions:
Our study shows that one-third of patients are not using the RC app for critical room functions. Future initiatives to increase RC usage should take these populations into consideration. Contrary to common belief, older patients may use tablet-enabled RCs just as often, if not more often, than younger patients. Certain admitting services, such as neurology and surgical subspecialties, may have had lower usage rates owing to accessibility issues. Our study allows hospitals to tailor support for specific patient populations to increase RC app usage.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.